Is the Judgement of Solomon Instructive in the Default Debate?

[reformist2]

From Wikipedia:

The Judgment of Solomon refers to a story from the Hebrew Bible in which Solomon ruled between two women both claiming to be the mother of a child. It has become a metaphor referring to a wise judge who uses a stratagem to determine the truth, tricking the parties into revealing their true feelings. Specifically, the judge pretends that he will destroy the subject matter of a dispute, rather than allowing either disputing party to win at the expense of the other.

The story is recounted in 1Kings 3:16-28. Two young women who lived in the same house and who both had an infant son came to Solomon for a judgement. One of the women claimed that the other, after accidentally smothering her own son while sleeping, had exchanged the two children to make it appear that the living child was hers. The other woman denied this and so both women claimed to be the mother of the living son and said that the dead boy belonged to the other.

After some deliberation, King Solomon called for a sword to be brought before him. He declared that there is only one fair solution: the live son must be split in two, each woman receiving half of the child. Upon hearing this terrible verdict, the boy's true mother cried out, "Please, My Lord, give her the live child—do not kill him!" However, the liar, in her bitter jealousy, exclaimed, "It shall be neither mine nor yours—divide it!" Solomon instantly gave the live baby to the real mother, realizing that the true mother's instincts were to protect her child, while the liar revealed that she did not truly love the child. The reputation of the king greatly increased when all the people of Israel heard of this wise judgement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_of_Solomon

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So we see the real mother, the one who truly cares about her child, would rather the baby go to the lying woman than see it cut in half by the judge. How does this apply to our present situation? If the Democrats really care about the safety net, they will let the Republicans have control of it rather than let it be shredded to bits by default.

[rucky]

1. Shall we get shagged now, or shall we get shagged later?

This is the same faulty logic as Bush fighting 'em over there so we don't have to fight 'em over here.

Failing to raise the debt ceiling will only hurt the safety net if we choose to fill the lifeboats with Wall Street & foreign investors and let the sick and elderly sink with the ship.

We have choices after the shit hits the fan. The people who think we don't are either playing us or are scared and willing to give up some now to avoid giving up more later. It wouldn't be the first time that the consequences were chosen by the same people who created the crisis. It's a nice racket, but I'm not falling for it anymore.

[Igel]

9. I'm rather less sure.

Now, I do believe that on 8/1 or 8/2 a nice bill will be passed by House and Senate and dutifully signed by a beaming President, and all three will claim victory. The (D) will exult in their having rousted the dragon called "Republican," which raided their herds and carried off their womenfolk and sons, while the (R) will laugh at having defeated the dreaded (D)ark Knight who threatened to upend the just and virtuous order.

Of course, the deficits will continue at $1.4 trillion a year, 3x the worst * could do to the country, but the (R) will be content at having gotten Obama to finally reduce the deficit by $3.25 a year while Obama glories in his record-setting deficit reduction of $32.50 over 10 years, all saved without cutting anything but the WH reception room candy budget.

Personally, I believe there's no chance of default. If Obama ordered Geithner to default he'd be out of there quickly and he knows it for ignoring the clear interpretation (if not intent) of the Constitution is, by all accounts, a high Crime. (Note that "high Crime" is no where defined). He'd not be removed from office, but would be impeached, and (D) would have a problem with claiming that the Constitution is just a piece of paper, after all, and can be ignored when expedient. Political unpleasantness of the highest order would be visited upon them all.

On the other hand, the deficits' continuing as they have been will result, eventually--probably not all that long after the Fed stops inflating the money supply by buying up government debt--in even greater economic unpleasantness. Either they inflate the money supply and that leads to what we jocularly term "inflation", a CPI that shoots skyward at great speed, or at the very least demand for new debt issues ceases to keep pace with the need to engage in issuing new debt. At that point that $220 billion/year interest payment will start gobbling up more and more of the budget until $3.25 is about all that's left in the discretionary spending account. And if the velocity of money and borrowing rates go back up in a recovery, boy is it going to be a rough ride.

[reformist2]

10. "We have choices after TSHTF." Like what? Please elaborate.

[originalpckelly]

2. Personally, I think it's the judgment of Dick Solomon:

He would bring a new officer into the field and give him the body of the child, so that they may understand what it is to raise a baby.

[kenny blankenship]

3. The story refers to the extreme favoritism shown by Solomon to the southern kingdom, Judah

and of course his own tribe.

Solomon, we learn elsewhere in the Bible, enslaved a third of the northern kingdom, Israel, in his drive to build the Temple, along with large numbers of non-Hebrew tribes living within the borders of his kingdom. Doubtlessly, due in large part to Solomon's extreme discrimination against the tribes of the north, the north seceded in the reign of Solomon's son. So, Solomon built the Temple but at the cost of the unified Kingdom of his father David. Metaphorically, he gave everything (the baby) to his own people of the Tribe of David and to the southern realm of Judah, because according to his public relations manager who penned this account, Solomon "recognized" Judah as the true mother of the Kingdom. The unified Kingdom Solomon inherited from this father, did not survive him by long, and was not reunified by his son. The two separate kingdoms Israel and Judah were afterwards at war with each other for long spells, and also forced at times to make alliances by external threats. They were later gobbled up, first the north and then the south, by Assyria and Babylonia.

Solomon's reputation for wisdom is lauded, Dear Leader style, in the first account of the "Judgment", but he is implicitly undercut by other commentary on his reign inserted into later books. Politically his sectional/tribal favoritism resulted in fracture and failure. I don't think Solomon should be held up as an example of how to tackle tricky political issues or how to arrive at balance.

And letting Republicans control the safety net is just insane.

If we assess the story not as pro-Solomon, pro-Judah propaganda, but take it on its own terms, then we have a model of brinksmanship that guides us in discovering who really cares about something by threatening to destroy it. Who are the contesting claimants in our present context? The Democratic Party vs. Republican Party as the two disputing "mothers" of the safety net? We all know who the true mother of the safety net is. Democrats created it under FDR and LBJ. Republicans at best went along with it; but they never proposed it themselves, as it runs contrary to their you're-on-your-own,-you-worthless-sinner "value" system. They have never stopped grumbling about it, nor do they stop trying to undermine it. Most recently, Gingrich and Bush the Lesser have tried to snare it for Wall Street in the 1990s and the 2000s. That should be clear enough for the people to make a judgment about who is the true mother of Social Security and Medic -are -aid. No appeal to the "ancient history" of the New Deal era is necessary, but a simple mention of that history should dispel all doubt. We created it and the Republicans can't be trusted with it.

But the real problem with applying the Judgment of Solomon to the issue of the safety net and who is to be trusted with it, is that the issue is not "clear cut" like proving maternity or paternity. We can't just offer to destroy the Safety Net or offer to hand it into the keeping of Republicans. They are generally not so stupid as to utterly destroy something the people love and rely on. (Although recent generations of Republicans do seem to be getting dumber and crazier, presumably as they in-breed among their kind) They won't call outright for the baby to be slaughtered. They will inject it with slow poisons. They will turn it into a cash conduit for their corporate patrons, like the recent health care "reform" - that was originally a Republican plan advanced by 90s GOP leaders as a counter to Clinton's health care proposal, and implemented by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts where health care costs are now the highest in the world. Voters would leap at their throats if they said "Put the baby to the sword!" They know that. They seek to denature the baby, to siphon its blood away from the poor patient for the benefit of the already rich. Or else they will poison it, so that years from now it will die, and people sadly shake their heads and say "It was never viable, it had to die eventually. We should never make a baby like this again." They will not see a murder, but instead believe an illusion that Nature has taken its course.

[damntexdem]

4. And when Solomon asked to have Wall Street cut in half ...

the true mother yelled: "That's right, gut the bastards!" And Solomon recognized the wisdom; but Obama dismissed him.

[reformist2]

5. It might be tempting to call a hostage taker's bluff, but what if...

What if you're wrong?

All you will have is your moral outrage, while millions of people go for weeks, perhaps months, without Medicare or food stamps. The safety net is too important to play games with - I don't think it's worth taking the risk.

[Scruffy1]

6. Wikipedia got the story wrong.

Solomon did not choose the real mother, but the best mother. My old Sunday school teaching mother explained it to me years ago. No where in the book does it say he chose the "real" mother. This is a lot of the reason Christianity has become a sham by making inferences that are unfounded. It's like reading morals into the histories and the old "slavery must be ok, it's in the Bible".
Also, anybody who would trust those scum with anything is no Solomon. The drunken Boner, chinless Mitch the Coal whore, Rand Paul-probsbly the dumbest man to serve since McCarthy . Crazy Coburn, the imminent scientist Inhoffe,Rubio the gangster, Kyl the evil spawn of a crooked Congresman from Iowa, Cornyn, possibly the most corrupt of all,Vitter the Diaper man and wholly owned by oil, Chuck Assly who never met an insurance company he wouldn't wear knee pads for, or McNasty who has to get his marching orders over the phone from his controller yet calls himself a Maverick (he's really a Koch branded steer).

[Igel]

7. Well, yes and no.

"The woman whose son was alive was deeply moved out of love for her son and said to the king, “Please, my lord, give her the living baby! Don’t kill him!”"

So unless you start pitching in additional text, the text as it stands says that it was the "woman whose son was alive"--there was only one son alive, and it was that son at issue in the judgment--who felt concern and it was to her that the tyke was awarded. You could always alter the text to something like, "The woman who falsely claimed it was her son who was alive was deeply moved for the son ..." Then again, you could also alter the text in the NT, "But these three abideth foolish: faith, hope, and love. And the most greatly ridiculous of these three is love." If you wanted.

According to the text he did choose the birth mother. According to the text he also chose the best mother. They're coreferential, not disjoint.

I don't know of anybody who says that he chose the birth mother simply because she was the birth mother. I have heard many who argued, rightly or wrongly, that the birth mother was more likely to be the one to have that kind of concern for her child. After all, it was hers and the choice was a dead baby or a living baby; if her baby was dead, the birth mother would experience a greater loss than if the baby was simply given to another. The other woman, meanwhile, already had both a dead baby as well as the knowledge that she would be accused of killing, through co-sleeping, her baby while somebody in close proximity would still have a baby. If the kid is given to her, she wins; if the baby is killed, she has reduced stigma and shame and again wins.

[Hawkowl]

8. The baby is SS and Medicare

The baby is not the deficit or taxes. On that note, Obama is the one pushing for a bloody dismemberment.

[Igel]

16. No.

The economy or the US is the baby. The argument, in a thumbnail sketch, is this: The stimulus saved the economy. $800 billion, about $32 billion/month saved or created about 120k jobs/month.

A dollar of spending produces about $2 in economic activity (let's round it off). A government dollar is a government dollar. If the government stops spending a dollar then that's $2 less in economic activity. It's why Obama and so many others are resistant to any significant deficit cuts. Every dollar cut is an even larger cut to the US economy.

We borrow about $130 billion a month and spend it. That's 5 1/2 times the average monthly stimulus amount. That is how much money would be sucked out of the economy in one month if the debt ceiling is not extended when it's reached. You're worried about a percentage point to SS or to a 2-year increase in the eligibility age in 5 years to Medicare or SS. But if the government shut down, a naive application of the theory would say that it would put 600,000 people out of work in those 4 weeks. The consequence would roil the markets and produce a lot of gridlock and uncertainty; that would almost certainly put a lot more people out of work.

More consequences would flow from that--decreased tax revenues, economic dislocations, foreclosures, sharply increased deficits; if we couldn't fund the troops overseas they'd have to be withdrawn on an emergency basis and even more government would shut down to allow funding that redeployment. At that point there really might not be money on 9/3 for SS and Medicare, either.

Now, I'm not Keynesian. But I think that the economic disruption that a government shutdown would cause, even for a week, would make the "dismemberment" of SS and Medicare discussed so far in public look like a "goochie-goochie" under the chin. People tend to think their own minor pains are outsized and that others' much larger pains are trivial.

[Igel]

11. I thought so.

It's why I used it recently.

There are a few things to consider.

** Would not increasing the debt limit be bad? That matches the analogy. The one woman didn't think killing the tyke would be all that problematic; the other did.

**Are there worse things than not raising the debt limit? In other words, are there things more important than the baby's life? Again, it matches the analogy: More important than the baby's life was letting the birth mother have it.

The real question involves who the birth mother is in this analogy. She cared more about the kid's life than she did about winning. Let the kid be given to another--I'll suffer great loss, but so long as he's okay that's fine. Nobody's stepped up to this role yet. *Any* of the players could, however.

The Senate (D) are mostly just sitting back, apart from the Gang of 6. Even that isn't exactly a worked out plan. It's sort of a suggestion of an outline, one that's certainly roiled the waters and riled the rabble. Like that sort of thing ever goes from the outline presented to a clean text without being morphed from bonobo to komodo dragon. No, no mother there.

The (R) are explicit but too diverse to deal with easily. Some act like they don't think there's any danger involved--sure, hack away, it's just a cheap smurf sword anyway. Others think that it would be a shame, but a necessary evil. They want to bring down the deficit, and it's a tool. If there's no debt limit increase, that, all by itself, will overfulfill their requirements, albeit painfully. They're more of the sort that would say, "If you kill the baby, maybe it'll bring home the plight of all the other destitute stolen children and finally get something done to save them!" Then there are those who think that there's a real downside, but again seem to be playing chicken. It's easy to play chicken when the sword's pointing at somebody else and you act like its not really your responsibility. So much for responsible grown ups.

Obama, the erstwhile grownup, should be the top choice for nurturing, empathic mother. But his rhetoric makes him sound oddly like the more delusional (R). A catastrophe looms--but X, Y, Z, alpha, qoph, and the entire Arabic alphabet up through nun would make him veto any debt limit increase and unleash the catastrophe. Perhaps he's bluffing and wants to trick us all. Perhaps he's not bluffing. Very few of the things that the (R) are demanding would be implemented at once, and none have been matched by a publicly presented counter-offer; very few of the long-term things he's denounced would be undoable by the 2013 Congress, but he's going to the mat for them. Over the long term, the revenue increases he's asking for a pitifully small, $80 billion a year versus a deficit of $1.6 trillion (5%, versus an average 8% increase in the baseline spending in the first actual spending bill he signed in 3/2009). The only one that couldn't be easily mitigated would be a small debt limit increase, and that's the one he's threatened to veto the most. Right now, he's a mother sitting there saying, "Well, as long as she keeps the kid quiet after 10 p.m., lets me have the johns that tip well, doesn't hang the diapers on my balcony or ask me to babysit, and lets me borrow that really sweet green dress on Friday nights, sure, I'll be the really responsible adult and let her have the kid." Not impressed. I can see a 16-year-old saying this kind of stuff. Not a real grown up.

There's hope that somebody's bluffing. That they're just trying to milk the deal for all its worth, but will settle for chump change in the end if that's all they get.

Most disturbing is the attitude I keep hearing and reading that whoever actually evinces concern for the economy by yielding is really a loser. All the respect seems to go for the hooker who would rather see the infant dead than for the one who was spineless and would yield up a kid to save its life. Hell, the heartless whore seems to have really large cheerleading sections on both sides of the aisle. I keep hoping for change. I keep seeing change, but not the kind that produces hope.

[sudopod]

12. PROTIP: Solomon didn't actually chop the baby in half. nt

[reformist2]

13. But you can be sure the bond market will!

They are a far harsher judge than Solomon.

[sudopod]

14. The bond market? nt

[Igel]

17. US debt obligations are bonds.

Chopping the baby would be cranking up the interest rate. It would only matter for new debt.

But with a deficit of $1.6 trillion projected for this year, and one not much smaller projected for next year, that's a lot of new debt.

I don't think the bond markets will care unless there's a default. I find it hard to believe that Obama would choose to default on US debt if the debt ceiling's not raised. He's not a fool.

[reformist2]

18. Yes. If interest rates double, we can forget about the safety net for the rest of our lives.

We will be like Greece, it will be all we can do to pay the interest on the debt.

[WinkyDink]

15. ".....safety net, they will let the Republicans have control of it......": ARE YOU CRAZY?!

[reformist2]

19. Have you given up on ever retaking the House? You have to pick your battles.